1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to a device and method for determining and adjusting the chassis geometry of a vehicle.
2. The Prior Art
The DE 10 2007 003 086 A1 describes a device for measuring the vehicle geometry of vehicles, especially of buses and lorries, said device having, in the direction of the vehicle's longitudinal axis, translationally adjustable wheel-receiving means upon which the front and/or rear wheels of the vehicle are positionable and which is arranged in a horizontal plane, and measuring systems being provided. A device of this kind has at least four wheel-receiving means adjustable in the direction of the vehicle's longitudinal axis, at least one rotary disc for receiving a wheel being located on each of said wheel-receiving means.
The DE 10 2006 036 671 A1 describes a method for determining a vehicle's axle geometry, in which light of a given structure is projected on a vehicle wheel and the diffusely reflected light is analyzed in order to determine therefrom the orientation of the plane of the vehicle wheel, several lines of laser light generated by one or several laser-light sources are projected on the wheel, one or several of these lines is/are faded in or out in temporal succession and the reflected light is captured by means of one or a plurality of cameras. The tire sidewall contours can be used to determine the maximum tire bead widths. For an ideal tire, they lie on a circle and define a possible wheel plane. In the case of a vehicle standing on its wheels during wheel alignment, the tire is deformed in the vicinity of the point where it contacts the floor, so that for calculating the plane, only contours can be used that are not in the vicinity of this point. On account of the tire lettering and lateral tire runout, one determines the orientation of the vehicle-wheel plane that is perpendicular to the wheel's axis of rotation via what is known as a reversal measurement. A reversal measurement involves averaging the vehicle-plane orientations measured during one rotation of the wheel. This chassis-geometry measuring system is sold by Dürr Assembly Products GmbH under the name “x-3Dprofile measuring system for chassis geometry”. The VisiCon dPP compact sensor used here operates according to the measuring principle of stereophotogrammetry. The wheel to be measured is illuminated by lasers (expanded into lines by cylindrical lenses) of high light intensity, which form a planar dot matrix and can be switched individually.